I'm not sure I follow how me essentially saying "I'm willing to fly on any of these 5 days, at your convenience, provided you give me some inventive" Is me demanding additional flexibility. That seems like less to me. I'm not talking about getting a refund, I'm talking about being able to trade them like you would a TV or some contractors you have on standby. Does any airline out there even offer that? Ie I buy a fully refundable ticket for $1000 to Nola for Mardi Gras when the cheapest available is $400 a year in advance. I hold it until Mar 2nd, and see that of the few tickets still available, they're $2500 each. How do I sell mine for $2000? At best any airline I think would offer is what I paid, forbidding direct transfer to someone else.

The reason this came up is that recently an acquaintance had their week long vacation cancelled last minute by the tour operator, and they were refunded the money. Needless to say this is mostly worthless because they didn't want the money - they wanted a vacation, and it is impossible to book something similar at such short notice for the same price. That got me thinking about the whole comparisons to options, because in effect it's like the airline "bought" the option back, except that they didn't have to do it at time-adjusted market rates (ie the cost for the same trip on that day), but rather at the price they sold it for. As everyone knows (generally) tickets are cheaper well in advance, so there is clearly a huge inverse time decay component to the pricing - but apparently it only goes one way.

But yes fair point about the re-sellers buying things up. Truthfully that's exactly what would happen, and possibly even the airlines themselves making their own exchange to further cash in. Didn't ticketmaster have a subsidiary that did that exact thing? "Sell" tickets they controlled to themselves, make it part of a "package" that included a hat or something, so they could essentially scalp them legally?

Anyways it was just a curious thought experiment.